Friday 18 February 2011

on seeing

I recently got my eyes tested, and unsurprisingly required new glasses. I don't drive, and with my old glasses the wider world had generally retreated into a fuzzy lack of focus. Something that by and large I did not find too vexing, unless I was specifically requiring to see something like which railway platform I had to go to.


By now my glasses are unfashionably thick varifocals, and apparently by being poor for distance they made it easier to read close too. I am very very short sighted!


My new glasses provided me with distance vision that seemed bionic in comparison to what I was used to. Unfortunately close too proved much more problematic. I need to move my head constantly when reading to keep things in crisp focus. I spend most of my time reading. The opticians also handed me a leaflet about the dangers of retinal detachment, which served to put the fear of god in me.


I've now had the new glasses tweaked and adjusted and had my prescription double checked. I suppose that my current eyesight with the new glasses is just what it is. I can read, but it is tiring and my eyes grow fuzzy by the end of the day. Generally my field of vision is a mosaic, some of it in focus, much of it not. I'm going back to being relatively contented to see little patches in relatively clarity with fuzzy margins elsewhere.


There can be few things more worrying than the thought of your eyesight diminishing. The world persists, it continues to exist out there, but unobserved by you. Even walking up to something is no guarantee that it will become clear.


Time does pass, and your time passes. You observe the world less clearly and you have to rely more on memories than observation or recent experience.


It is a time to think about what you take pleasure in, and what is valuable to you.

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